Beth Macy started hearing the stories back in 1989, as soon as she moved to Virginia to write feature stories for the Roanoke Times. Stories about the two black albino brothers kidnapped from the tobacco fields and sold into the circus. Warnings from parents issued as they dropped the kids off at the fair.

"You stick together, or you might get snatched up like Eko and Iko."

Macy, a journalist to the core, knew there was a story there. She just didn't know she'd spend the next twenty-five years trying to tell it.

(Little, Brown and Company)

Eko and Iko, it turned out, where the circus names given George and Willie Muse. When they were nine and six years sold, they were whisked away from the fields and thrust into a new life as circus freaks. Not just any circus, either. They were a Ringling Brothers attraction, scarcely paid and badly exploited.

But that's just the surface of Truevine (Little, Brown, $28), Macy's exhaustively reported work of narrative nonfiction that was recently named a finalist for the prestigious Kirkus Prize.

You may find yourself wanting the tale of the Muse brothers to emerge as a simple tale of inhumanity and injustice. There's a certain satisfaction in that. But the story is too thorny and complicated for that approach, and Macy, whose last book was the New York Times bestseller Factory Man, does us the favor of respecting that complexity.

For instance, a natural first reaction would be to label Truevine as another story of Jim Crow South atrocity. "It is a very southern story because of the background of tobacco and slavery," Macy says in a recent interview. "But in the '20s, '30s and '40s, the family was treated badly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and newspapers all over the country. In some ways it's not just Southern."

Macy is a digger and a listener, as all great reporters are. That means combing archives for research and old newspaper stories. It means taking the time to foster trust: Macy's key source for Truevine was Nancy Sanders, George and Willie's great-niece. She was a tough nut to crack. "She wasn't seeing me as someone she could open up to. She still doesn't trust me all the way, but she's read it, and she likes it."

There's no doubt George and Willie Muse were treated badly, consigned to the freak show tent and given elaborate and racist backstories. Cannibals! Ambassadors from Mars! Among Truevine's detours is a deep dive into circus history, with all of its hucksterism and hyperbole.

But Truevine also contains less convenient truths. To varying degrees, the Muse family, especially the boys' father, Cabell, was complicit in the exploitation. Nearly everyone, it seems, was trying to make a buck off these white-skinned black men who could barely see in the sunlight. George and Willie actually returned home for a while. Then they went back to the circus. As Macy says, "They grew up in the circus with some Stockholm Syndrome."

Macy follows dead ends and recalibrates her direction. Rather than imposing her will on what she wants the story to be, she goes where the story leads. Truevine isn't just an obscured chapter of American history; it's also a peek inside a dogged reporter's process.

Some of the most fun she had? "Driving around with 80- or 90- year-olds and asking questions: 'What was here then? What did that look like?' You get these really poignant moments of things that had happened, which I would never have gotten had I not been out driving around with them.